The U.S. military’s budget request now pending on Capitol Hill includes a particularly notable oddity inside the special fund meant to support combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan: a new $810 million U.S. defense initiative to “reassure” Europeans of their security in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s Crimean land grab.
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Gordon Adams, who served as associate director for national security and international affairs at the Office of Management and Budget in the 1990s and returned briefly to OMB as part of Obama’s transition team in 2009, said in an interview that “we had a sort of informal understanding with the Defense Department that they would follow those guidelines when submitting OCO requests. And if you detected that they’d been honored in the breach, you’d be right. Every year, that breach gets a little wider.”
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